A way with words
BOOKS There has been plenty of variety on offer in the year’s biggest books, writes Justine Jordan.
AS WITH Wolf Hall three years ago, Christmas novel-wrapping will be dominated by Hilary Mantel’s latest feat of historical imagination. Bring Up the Bodies won its author a second Booker, and continues to build a Tudor world that feels solid enough to touch, bringing Thomas Cromwell’s life into the precarious present tense and the reader to the heart of Henry VIII’s court. This volume focuses on the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the darkening mood of Henry’s reign, and the chilling practicalities of interrogation and torture.
This year’s Booker also gave a welcome boost to some left-field books from small publishers, shortlisting Alison Moore’s immersive tale of a man unable to escape his own family history, The Lighthouse, and Deborah Levy’s sly melodrama Swimming Home.
Also on the shortlist was Will Self with Umbrella, his deepest and most rewarding novel to date. Madness, war, mechanisation; class, feminism and modernity – all these and more are interrogated in a dense slab of prose that spans the 20th century and jumps from one consciousness to another in the high old modernist style. One for the James Joyce fan in your life.
All the big names were out this year. Martin Amis railed against the debasement of English culture in Lionel Asbo, while Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth was simultaneously a tongue-in-cheek riff on his own early stories, a typically assured spy novel with a sting in the tail, and a meditation on the relationship between reader and writer.
Sequels and prequels were everywhere, with Rose Tremain returning to the hero of Restoration in Merivel, Irvine Welsh revisiting Trainspotting territory for Skagboys and Alan Garner – a mere 50 years on – concluding his classic sequence of children’s novels with the adult volume Boneland. There were new novels from Peter Carey, Pat Barker and John Banville; a slim volume from Toni Morrison, Home; a big, rollicking one from John Irving, In One Person; and a huge, very loud one, MOSTLY IN CAPITALS, from Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood.
The big seller, of course – if one discounts the tsunami of erotica flowing from the pens of EL James and imitators – was JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, a wizardfree saga about high passions and low deeds in a parish council election that reads like a mash-up between Jonathan Coe and Joanna Trollope.
Richard Ford’s seventh novel was almost universally acclaimed: Canada is a beautifully written exploration of family tragedy, cosmic uncertainty and the North American landscape, with a killer opening. ‘‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.’’ In mid-century Montana, a teenager is violently uprooted; he flees across the border into Canada, and a difficult new life.
NW, Zadie Smith’s first novel in seven years, zeroed in on a small patch of London to explore everyday life in the capital: Geographical proximity and social distance, the bounds of place and the desire to escape. Some critics complained about its fragmentary nature and wobbly overall plot, but sentence by sentence, no one comes close for combining formal playfulness with syllable-perfect dialogue and fresh perceptions; certainly nothing else has given me greater reading pleasure this year.
Staying in north London, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child was one of 2012’s oddest, most remarkable books: A detective novel in which everyday life is harder to puzzle out than any